President Barack Obama on the campaign trail. (Photo credit: barackobama.com)

More Washington insiders are coming to the conclusion that Israel's
leaders are planning to attack Iran before the U.S. election in November
in the expectation that American forces will be drawn in. There is
widespread recognition that, without U.S. military involvement, an
Israeli attack would be highly risky and, at best, only marginally
successful.

At this point, to dissuade Israeli leaders from mounting such an
attack might require a public statement by President Barack Obama
warning Israel not to count on U.S. forces -- not even for the
"clean-up." Though Obama has done pretty much everything short of making
such a public statement, he clearly wants to avoid a confrontation with
Israel in the weeks before the election.

The recent pilgrimages to Israel by very senior U.S. officials --
including the Secretaries of State and Defense carrying identical
"PLEASE DON'T BOMB IRAN JUST YET" banners -- has met stony faces and
stone walls.

Like the Guns of August in 1914, the dynamic for war appears
inexorable. Senior U.S. and Israeli officials focus publicly on a
"window of opportunity," but different ones.

On Thursday, White House spokesman Jay Carney emphasized the need to
allow the "most stringent sanctions ever imposed on any country time to
work." That, said Carney, is the "window of opportunity to persuade Iran ... to forgo its nuclear weapons ambitions."

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That same day a National Security Council spokesman dismissed Israeli
claims that U.S. intelligence had received alarming new information
about Iran's nuclear program. "We continue to assess that Iran is not on
the verge of achieving a nuclear weapon," the spokesman said.

Still, Israel's window of opportunity (what it calls the "zone of
immunity" for Iran building a nuclear bomb without Israel alone being
able to prevent it) is ostensibly focused on Iran's continued burrowing
under mountains to render its nuclear facilities immune to Israeli air
strikes, attacks that would seek to maintain Israel's regional
nuclear-weapons monopoly.

But another Israeli "window" or "zone" has to do with the
pre-election period of the next 12 weeks in the United States. Last
week, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevi told
Israeli TV viewers, "The next 12 weeks are very critical in trying to
assess whether Israel will attack Iran, with or without American
backup."

It would be all too understandable, given Israeli Prime Minister
Netanyahu's experience with President Obama, that Netanyahu has come
away with the impression that Obama can be bullied, particularly when he
finds himself in a tight political spot.

For Netanyahu, the President's perceived need to outdistance
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the love-for-Israel
department puts Obama in a box. This, I believe, is the key "window of
opportunity" that is uppermost in Netanyahu's calculations.

Virtually precluded, in Netanyahu's view, is any possibility that
Obama could keep U.S. military forces on the sidelines if Israel and
Iran became embroiled in serious hostilities. What I believe the Israeli
leader worries most about is the possibility that a second-term Obama
would feel much freer not to commit U.S. forces on Israel's side. A
second-term Obama also might use U.S. leverage to force Israeli
concessions on thorny issues relating to Palestine.

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If preventing Obama from getting that second term is also part of
Netanyahu's calculation, then he also surely knows that even a minor
dustup with Iran, whether it escalates or not, would drive up the price
of gasoline just before the election -- an unwelcome prospect for Team
Obama.

It's obvious that hard-line Israeli leaders would much rather have
Mitt Romney to deal with for the next four years. The former
Massachusetts governor recently was given a warm reception when hetraveled
to Jerusalem with a number of Jewish-American financial backers in tow
to express his solidarity with Netanyahu and his policies.

Against this high-stakes political background, I've personally come
by some new anecdotal information that I find particularly troubling. On
July 30, the Baltimore Sun posted my op-ed,
"Is Israel fixing the intelligence to justify an attack on Iran?"
Information acquired the very next day increased my suspicion and
concern.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for 27 years, and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). His (more...)